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“She’s a little too good at her role.”
“She, too, always thought I ought to have been a better man,” Benedetto said. He shook his head. “When they found their way to this tower I was to offer them a way out. One that kept them safe, gave them whatever they wanted, and made me seem darker and more villainous to the outside world. And he made me vow that I would continue to do this forever, until one of these women gave me a son. And even then, I was to allow her to leave me. Or stay, but live a fully supported, separate life. ‘You had two chances and you blew them both,’ he told me. ‘You don’t get any more.’”
“How many chances did he get?” Angelina demanded, her voice as hot as that flash of lightning in her eyes.
“But that was the problem,” Benedetto said in the same way he’d told her, on their wedding night, that he missed the man who had created this prison for him. “My grandfather was a hard man. I do not think he was particularly kind. But he loved my grandmother to distraction and never quite recovered from her loss. She was the best of us. He told me that he was glad she had died before she could see all the ways in which I failed to live up to what she dreamed for me, because after my father had proved so disappointing, they had had such hopes that I would be better.”
Angelina frowned. “I’m not sure how you were responsible for Carlota’s choices on the one hand—in the face of her own family’s pressure, presumably—and an act of nature on the other.”
“It was not that I was personally responsible for what happened to them,” Benedetto said quietly. “It was that I was so arrogant about both of them. Boorish and self-centered. It never occurred to me to inquire into Carlota’s emotional state. And everything Sylvia and I did together was irresponsible. Would a decent man ever have let her out of his sight, knowing the state she was in?”
“A question one could ask of your grandfather,” Angelina said.
“But you see, he didn’t force me into this. He suggested I bore responsibility and suggested I test myself. I was the one who had spent the happy parts of my childhood playing out involved fantasies in these walls. Ogres and kings. Spells and enchantments. I thought I was already cursed after what had happened to Carlota and Sylvia. Why not prove it? Because the truth is, I never got over the loss of my grandmother either, and she was the one who had always encouraged the games I played. In some twisted way, it seemed like a tribute.” Benedetto reached over and touched her face again, smoothing her hair back with one big hand. “And if my grandfather had not agreed, because without her we were both incapable of loving anything—too much like my father—could I have found my way to you?”
She let go the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“I don’t care how you got here,” Angelina told him, like another vow. “Just as long as you stay here now you’ve come.”
Outside, lightning flashed and the storm rumbled. The sea fought back.
But inside this tower, empty of everything but the feelings they felt for one another, Angelina felt something bright and big swell up inside her.
It felt like a sob. It felt overwhelming, like grief.
She had the strangest feeling that it was something else altogether.
Something like joy.
“I don’t want to leave you,” she told him. “I don’t want to play these games that serve no one. I have always wanted to be more than a bartering chip for my own father, and you are far more than a monster, Benedetto. What would happen if you and I made our own rules?”
“Angelina...” His voice was a low whisper that she knew, without a shred of doubt, came from the deepest, truest parts of him. “Angelina, you should know. I had read all about the Charteris sisters before I ever came to your father’s house. And I assumed that I would pick the one who seemed best suited for me, on paper.”
“If you are a wise man,” she replied dryly, “you will never tell me which one you mean.”
And just like that, both of them were smiling.
As if the sun had come up outside when the rain still fell.
“I walked into that dining room and saw an angel,” he told her, wonder in his eyes. In the hands that touched her face. “And I knew better, because I knew that no matter who I chose, it would end up here. Here in the locked tower where all my bodies are buried, one way or another. And still, I looked at you and saw the kind of light I have never believed could exist. Not for me.”
“Benedetto...” she whispered, the joy and the hope so thick it choked her.
“I had no intention of touching you, but I couldn’t help myself. How could you be anything but an angel, when you could make a piano sing like that? You have entranced me and ruined me, and I have spent two months trying to come to terms with the fact you will leave me like all the rest. I can’t.”
“You don’t have to come to terms with that.”
“Maybe this is crazy,” he continued, wonder and intensity in every line of his body. “Maybe I’m a fool to imagine that anything that starts in Castello Nero could end well. But I look at you, Angelina, and you make me imagine that anything is possible. Even love, if we do it together.”
And for a moment, she forgot to breathe.
Then she did, and the breath was a sob, and there were tears on her face that tasted like the waiting, brooding sea.
Angelina thought,This is what happiness can be, if you let it.
If for once she believed in the future before her, not tired old stories of a past she’d never liked all that much to begin with.
If she believed in her heart and her hands, the man before her, and the baby she knew they’d already made.
